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When GMR began work on the Hyderabad International Airport, it was estimated that the airport would cater to five million passengers per annum. The infrastructure, including the backend IT, was accordingly put in place. Halfway through the project, this estimate was raised to seven million passengers per annum, which required GMR to re-configure networks and ports for additional capacity and make other changes in the infrastructure. With six months left to begin operations, the estimate was changed to 12 million passengers per annum.
Fortunately, we had configured the servers for additional capacity, for up to 20 million passengers. The change in estimate, therefore, required us to work only on re-configuring networks and ports, and adjust the space, power points, etc, for additional check-in counters and so on, says Sivaram Tadepalli, CIO, Delhi Airport who was also associated with the companys hyderabad project.
Change in market conditions is just one of the challenges that IT forecasting faces. There are several others such as rapid changes in technology changes or sudden competitor moves. Sometimes, it appears that it would be impossible to accurately forecast an enterprises IT needs in such a rapidly changing scenario.
Why forecasting is important?
IT forecasting should be able to guide the business on how to use IT better, says Tadepalli. It balances the growth of business with the cost of IT involved. IT should be able to ensure that as the volume of business transactions increases, the cost of each transaction does not increase; rather, it should go down. Only then can it add to bottom line growth, he adds.
Most businesses today are enabled by IT, and some even have IT as the backbone for their product, solution or service delivery. Today, having adequate IT infrastructure is a given and does not give you any special strategic advantage. But not having it definitely puts you at a huge disadvantage against competition. Therefore, it is impractical to think of a business plan without an adequate and well thought out IT infrastructure plan, says Mohan Verma, Executive Director, PriceWaterhouse Coopers (PwC).
Constructing forecast
Business requirements and priorities set the guidelines for IT forecasting, says Tadepalli.
Its demand-based forecasting, says Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner. Organisations should align their IT needs based on the short-term, medium-term and long-term business plans and goals.
Most companies in India follow a bottom-up approach to IT, says Krishnamurthy Hegde, Enterprise Solutions Architect and the Founder of Interactive Media Worldwide, a hugely popular community on LinkedIn. He explains that when a company begins operations, it starts acquiring hardware and applications as and when the need arises. That, according to him, is a good way to start, because at that point, it is difficult to forecast a growth roadmap for the business.
However, as complexity increases, the company will face a bottleneck in making these diverse pieces of IT work together. That is the time to introduce a top-down approach for IT forecasting and build an enterprise-wide architecture for your applications, he explains.
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